neoliberalism

Introduction

On May 3rd, 2013, Keguro Macharia wrote a piece for The New Inquiry called ‘On quitting’. It was a courageous, painfully beautiful piece that started with a diagnosis: ‘bipolar disorder, an oscillation between periods of frenetic activity and periods of profound depression’ (Macharia, 2013). This is a condition perfectly compatible with the academic calendar, he added, chronicled by an alternation of almost drug-induced bursts of mental productivity followed by a near-catatonic state of exhaustion and prolonged delays.

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

The purpose of the contemporary university is being radically transformed by the encroachment of corporate imperatives into higher education. This has inevitable consequences for managerial interventions, ​​​funding structures, and teaching and research audits. It also impacts on the working conditions of academic staff in university institutions in terms of teaching, research, administration and public engagement.

The almost 30-year history of postsocialism has largely eluded organization theory, even though the unfettered expansion of neoliberalism has been seen as a vindication of the collapse of the former eastern bloc. This makes it timely to consider what has happened with (post)socialist organizations, not only in terms of the flow of ‘Western’ concepts of management and organizing... more

Issue editors: Kean Birch and Simon Springer

Neoliberalism is a ubiquitous concept nowadays, used across numerous disciplines and in the analysis of diverse and varied phenomena (Springer et al., 2016). It is conceptualized in different ways as, for example, a geographical process; a form of governmentality; the restoration of elite class power; a political project of institutional change; a set of transformative ideas; a development policy paradigm; an epistemic community or thought collective; and an economic ideology or doctrine (Springer, 2010, 2016a; Flew, 2014; Birch, 2015a). In relation to organization studies, and this journal especially, neoliberalism has been strongly associated with the restructuring of economics as a tool of governance (e.g. Davies and Dunne, 2016), the transformation of universities and academia as sites of knowledge pro-sumption and immaterial labour (e.g. Rai, 2013), the rise of business schools as centres of social and political reproduction (e.g. Harney, 2009), and the extension... more